“The president has exempted over 1,200 groups, including members of Congress, from the health care law.”

During an appearance on CNN, Scalise, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, combined two common assertions made by opponents of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

How valid are these claims? Let’s take a look.

The first part of Scalise’s statement refers to one-year waivers that the Department of Health and Human Services granted to 1,231 companies regarding the law’s restrictions of annual benefit caps.

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Yep, you read that correctly. He is referring to a one-year waiver regarding one, relatively small aspect of the law.

The waivers were granted to companies (such as McDonald’s or other fast food chains) that provided inexpensive bare-bones health plans known as “mini-meds,” in what the administration called “a bridge” to 2014, when the law would be fully implemented. That’s because the law says that annual coverage limits can’t be lower than $750,000 in 2013 — and there are no annual dollar limits starting in 2014. So without those waivers, employees in those companies might have been left in the lurch until the law fully went into effect.

All told, the waivers cover a little under 4 million people, or 3 percent of the population. But Scalise is wrong to suggest these waivers were permanent — or went to “groups.” The waivers to this one part of the law expire in just a few months.

“Every waiver given by President Obama to specific groups or companies constitutes an exemption from the ACA the employer mandate and the benefit caps to 1,231 groups are two such exemptions,” said Stephen Bell, communications director for the committee.

As for Congress being exempted, this is also incorrect.

As a result of an amendment offered by Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, the Affordable Care Act includes a provision that would require members of Congress (and their personal staffs) to get their insurance on the Obamacare exchanges.

But there was an unexpected wrinkle: the exchanges are intended for people who currently do not get employer-provided insurance, whereas lawmakers and their staffs previously had about 70 percent of their insurance premiums underwritten by the federal government through the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.

For lawmakers and their staffs, the loss of employer contributions would have amounted to an unintended pay cut of between $5,000 to $10,000. Under pressure from Congress, the Office of Personnel Management proposed a rule in August, which was finalized in September, saying the federal government could still contribute to health-care premiums.

The final rule would keep the subsidy in place only for members of Congress and affected staff who enroll in a Small Business Health Options Program (SHOP) plan available in the District of Columbia. Such plans most commonly will be aimed at employees of businesses with fewer than 50 workers, but perhaps the theory is that each lawmaker and his or her staff constitute a small business. In any case, lawmakers and their staffs are not eligible for the tax credits that other Americans using the exchanges might qualify for.

The Fact Checker takes no position on whether making up the lost contribution is a good or bad thing — some Republicans have proposed to eliminate it in some of the proposals circulating to end the government shutdown — but it’s a stretch to claim that this is some sort of exemption from the law. Members of Congress and their staffs are certainly enrolled in the health care plan, and it’s a rather technical question about whether the administration overstepped its authority or whether it was merely taking action that lawmakers (including House Speaker John Boehner) privately urged because the difficult politics of the health-care law made a legislative fix all but impossible.

Bell argued that “under the OPM rule, approximately 16,000 congressional employees will obtain their health insurance through the SHOP exchanges, 320 times more than the amount supposedly allowed under the law.” He said this “is clearly an exemption from the ACA for Congress by the Obama Administration.” He cited a dictionary definition of exemption: “freedom from being required to do something that others are required to do.”

But as we noted, the exchanges were not intended for people already with employer-provided insurance. So it’s already a rather unusual situation. Costs have been imposed on lawmakers and their staffs that did not previously exist, and OPM’s rule appears intended to solve that problem — instead of “exempting” them from the health care law.

Scalise’s use of the word “exempted” is much too expansive. He gives the impression that vast segments of politically connected “groups” have been excused from the health care law when in fact he is mostly referring to a one-year waiver that was intended to make the transition to the new system easier for people with bare-bones insurance. The issue concerning Congress is more complex, but the bottom line is that the administration’s action was intended to reduce an unintended burden, not carve out an exception.